Description
Book SynopsisActing as an important historical archive for the Jews of Eastern Europe, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture examines the progress of Yiddish culture from its origins in Tsarist and inter-war Poland to its apex with the founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute in 1925.
Trade Review"Fishman's no-nonsense account of modern Yiddish and twentieth-century Jewish schisms... eschews the nostalgia and sentimentality associated with Yiddish, and gives a vivid picture of how Yiddish and Yiddish literature were promoted by even the socialist and anti-Zionist Bundists as a means of preserving Jewishness." - International Jerusalem Post "Yiddish was above all a language of the people... Hebrew was the tongue of traditional Jewish learning... German, Polish and Russian, by contrast, offered the Jews a way from isolation to assimilation, cultural as much as linguistic. These multiple associations are all incisively reconstructed and investigated in Fishman's The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture.... It gives a vivid sense of a language that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century." - London Review of Books "This book can be warmly recommended not only to students of East European Jewish history and culture but also to all those interested in the ways in which language intersects with nationalism." - Jews in Russia and East Europe "Fishman has a terrific command of the subject and utilizes a wealth of primary sources to flesh out some of the pivotal turning points in the growth of modern Yiddish culture.... [His] book is a solid and much needed contribution to serious scholarship." - Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies"
